Dear Room 23 Families,
Thank you for a wonderful Back to School Night. It
was pleasure to connect with you and begin to develop a solid foundation for
growth and success this year!
The sign-up
sheet for conferences went home in this week’s green folder. Please fill it
out and return it to me at your earliest convenience. I will then follow-up
with a confirmation email about your conference date and time.
Our
Kimochis lessons with Ms. Jen are
underway. We started with developing and performing skits about “Key 1:
Getting Someone’s Attention” and last week students focused on “Key 2: Use a
Talking Tone of Voice Instead of a Fighting Tone of Voice”. A flyer will be
sent home weekly highlighting each Key. Ms. Jen will be with us for the next five
weeks, bringing us through all of the Kimochis Keys. Thank you, Ms. Jen!
Poetry
classes will begin next week. We’ll take our poems
through the writing process including editing, revising, publishing, and
illustrating. Thank you, Kiddo!
Please read below for additional details
regarding what we’re working on in class.
Thank you!
Teresa Shern
Reading:
We continue working on “Building a Reading Life” during Reader’s Workshop. We
began working with reading partners this week with the goal of talking about
books in order to boost reading comprehension through following text clues,
making high-level predictions, and retelling. Our mentor text for this portion
of the unit is Stone Fox, by John Reynolds Gardiner. We will also
continue our read aloud of Firefly Hollow, by Alison McGhee.
Writing:
We will continue our narrative writing unit, especially focusing on the idea
that writers use their own lives to inspire their writing. Students have made
lists of important places and people and are using these as inspiration for new
writing entries. Our writing fluency is increasing…we reached ten minutes last
week and are proud of this accomplishment!
Math:
We’re working on elapsed time and displaying data as well as discussing multiplication
strategies and introducing division. Students will take the Unit 1 Math
Assessment next week. Corrected tests will come home for parent review. Please
be on the lookout for additional details.
Social
Studies: We will continue to look at Miwok artifacts as
well as “digging deeper” into the different ways of Miwok life. We will create
a research flipbook and will begin recording important information. Students have
chosen one important aspect of Miwok life and are currently researching their
topics. They will then write a paragraph, create a Google Slide, and then
present the information to the class.
Science:
We are well into our Inheritance and
Traits Unit. Throughout this unit, we will be acting as Wildlife
Biologists, trying to solve a mystery as to why a wolf, “Wolf 44” is white when
the rest of his pack is black. We recently discovered another pack of wolves
that is all white and are wondering if one of these wolves could be Wolf 44’s
mom or dad. We’re realizing that species have traits in common, however within
these traits there can be variation and that offspring within a species will
carry traits of its parents. This week we will begin learning about DNA and
genes.
